Fatty alcohols make up an important category of industrial biochemicals. These molecules and their derivatives have numerous uses, including as surfactants, lubricants, plasticizers, solvents, emulsifiers, emollients, thickeners, flavors, fragrances, and fuels. In industry, fatty alcohols are produced via catalytic hydrogenation of fatty acids produced from natural sources, such as coconut oil, palm oil, palm kernel oil, tallow and lard, or by chemical hydration of alpha-olefins produced from petrochemical feedstock. Fatty alcohols derived from natural sources have varying chain lengths. The chain length of fatty alcohols is important with respect to particular applications. In nature, fatty alcohols are also made by enzymes that are able to reduce acyl-ACP or acyl-CoA molecules to the corresponding primary alcohols (see, for example, U.S. Patent Publication Nos. 20100105955, 20100105963, and 20110250663, which are incorporated by reference herein).
Current technologies for producing fatty alcohols involve inorganic catalyst-mediated reduction of fatty acids to the corresponding primary alcohols, which is costly, time consuming and cumbersome. The fatty acids used in this process are derived from natural sources (e.g., plant and animal oils and fats, supra). Dehydration of fatty alcohols to alpha-olefins can also be accomplished by chemical catalysis. However, this technique is nonrenewable and associated with high operating cost and environmentally hazardous chemical wastes. Thus, there is a need for improved methods for fatty alcohol production and the instant disclosure addresses this need.